The Admirable Lightness of “The Art of Fielding”

The Book Club is reading “The Art of Fielding” in September. Chad Harbach will join us for a live online chat on Wednesday, September 28th, at 2 P.M. E.T.

In his Vanity Fair piece on “The Art of Fielding” and the current state of the publishing business, Keith Gessen recalls reading an early draft of Chad Harbach’s novel and finding it to be “a little light.” (The article is not available online, but an expanded e-book version can be purchased for Nook or Kindle.) Gessen goes on:

I didn’t say this at the time, but it felt a little like a Disney film. (The Bad News Bears go to liberal-arts college.) I was surprised that my friend had spent five years working on something so insubstantial.

Though Gessen later describes the ways in which Harbach improved the novel in subsequent drafts (“more compact, less sentimental, funnier”), I think it’s fair to say that a lightness of tone and style (and to a lesser extent of subject matter) has persisted into the published version of the book. To my mind, that pervasive lightness is one of the novel’s virtues and helps conceal some of its flaws. Ultimately, I think “The Art of Fielding” is a work of escapism—a work of escapism about the perils of escaping.

The novel follows the intersecting fates of five characters at a fictional Wisconsin college named Westish. The characters are Henry Skrimshander, a baseball star for the Westish team, the Harpooners; Mike Schwartz, the hulking, erudite team leader and mentor to Henry; Owen Dunne, Henry’s gay mulatto roommate; Guert Affenlight, the college’s bachelor president; and Guert’s wayward daughter, Pella, who has fled an unhappy marriage to the sanctuary of Westish. The narrative is third person and hops among these five points of view as it relates a plot centered on the consequences of an errant throw made by Henry, which puts Owen in the hospital. (Be warned: spoilers ahead).

Many reviews—including Wyatt Mason’s in The New Yorker—have compared Harbach’s novel to the work of Jonathan Franzen, but the writers who came to mind most often for me were John Irving and Mark Helprin, authors of sprawling, plot-driven, reader-friendly (but still literate) novels that are often woven with the texture of fable. While it is true that Harbach, like Franzen, writes in a mildly satirical tone, his book does its best to hold the heavyweight themes of “Freedom” and “The Corrections” and many other contemporary novels at arm’s length. Here, for example, is the extent to which Harbach allows geopolitics to manifest themselves in “The Art of Fielding”:

When he arrived in the locker room, Schwartzy and Owen were discussing the Middle East. Henry was late; the discussion had already reached its terminal stage.

“Israel.”

“Palestine.”

“Israel.”

“Palestine.”

“Israel!” Schwartz roared. He slammed the heel of his hand into the steel of his locker. Owen shook his head and whispered, with no less conviction:

“Palestine.”

The scene tells you nothing about the situation in the Middle East, but it’s funny and serves to define the characters and capture the bantering, badgering exchanges that go on in locker rooms. Similarly, Owen’s advocacy for more environmentally friendly policies at Westish ends up being little more than an occasion for him to meet Affenlight and set their relationship in motion. Mike’s self-deliberations over his use of prescription painkillers and Henry’s descent into depression after he loses his ability to field his position are both rendered in entertainingly comic scenes. Is there a reader of this novel who thought, even for a moment, that the book would end with Mike addicted to narcotics or that Henry would spend the rest of his days peeing into bottles?

There are no evil or malevolent characters in “The Art of Fielding.” Pella’s controlling husband comes across as more pompous than threatening; Adam Starblind, the Harpooners’ womanizing stud pitcher is a predatory but ultimately harmless lothario; and Dean Melkin, who forces Guert Affenlight into a career crisis, is officious rather than backstabbing. The only significant death in the book is a necessary one, required to sew up the plot and also to keep the book from being too fanciful.

This lack of darkness and Harbach’s unerring ability to imbue almost every scene with warmth and humor keeps the reader focussed on the plot, which moves quickly, and serves to distract you from some of “The Art of Fielding”’s less probable elements. I, for one, was never convinced by Affenlight’s sudden and overwhelming infatuation with Owen, but I understood that it was a necessary ligature in the cross-stitching that connects the novel’s quintet of protagonists. Because Harbach is rarely heavy-handed, and never seems to insist that you believe him, I went with it. And I was glad I did. The same is true of the myraid literary allusions in the book. They are there if you wish to pursue them, but failing to pursue them won’t prevent you from thoroughly enjoying the novel.

“The Art of Fielding” has often been referred to as a baseball novel, but I think it is more truly a campus comedy, as much in the tradition of “Lucky Jim” and “Straight Man” as it is of “The Natural” (though it places sports in the central spot usually occupied by academics). The book’s action takes place almost entirely on or near the Westish campus and this is appropriate, since all of the characters are, in one way or another young—or young at heart—and trying to avoid the real world. Even Guert Affenlight, the college president, prefers a bachelor pad in a school building to the off-campus house his position affords him.

The book revolves around each character’s negotiations with his or her desire for escape. Late in the novel, Henry is forced to come to grips with the idea that he may not be able to spend the rest of his life playing baseball. Pella, who has been looking after during his depression, tries to get him to talk.

He’d never been able to talk to anyone, not really. Words were a problem, the problem. Words were tainted somehow…

Only on the field had he ever been able to express himself. Off the field there was no other way than with words, unless you were some kind of artist or musician or mime…

Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing if anyone would catch them… It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the non-baseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends was made of words.

What Harbach accomplishes in “The Art of Fielding” is to create for the reader (or this reader, at any rate) a space as safe and blissful as the baseball diamond was for Henry before his errant throw. He has created that space with words. During the days that I was reading the novel, I was always delighted to escape from my own “non-baseball world” of jobs and friends and worries and live instead in Westish, Wisconsin. I was sorry to leave when it ended, but, as the book poignantly illustrates, eventually everyone has to face reality.

Jon Michaud is a novelist and the head librarian at The Center for Fiction.